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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

It's also incredibly biased towards Wil (no surprise, as he wrote it).

In reality, Wil himself was the harasser and abuser, and the reports against him were completely justified. He got bofa'd and in response started reporting other users for even the slightest provocation. And it wasn't just reporting other users; he was specifically reporting a bunch of trans women, which really puts him in a poor light considering the fiasco with his Twitter blocklist that he put a ton of LGBT people on and pretty much ruined the lives of a bunch of independent trans artists who suddenly lost their source of income.

Now it's certainly possible that a group of people decided to mob him with reports, but personally I think it's pretty likely that those 60 reports overnight were all legitimate reactions to his campaign of abuse against other people.

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> pretty much ruined the lives of a bunch of independent trans artists who suddenly lost their source of income.

Could you elaborate on this? I keep pretty clear of the petty squabbles that go on in the social justice space* so I'm not aware of this.

*Not to say that social justice isn't important, however there is a section that is more interested in generating noise than change. I've found most of the very minor celebrities involved are of the "noise" variety rather than "change".

Wil used and popularised Randi Harper's personal blocklist after ggautoblocker stopped being maintained and Randi Harper's list ended up with a bunch of trans attacktivists on it after they took exception to her saying something positive about Jesse Singal because he'd written something positive about Alice Dreher's book which analyzed the attacks on a couple of people by the extreme-SJ lot and didn't sufficiently condemn the targets as evil in the process (because that wasn't what she was analyzing but, yeah, well, the internet).

The result was lots of people whose only crime was having yelled at Randi getting blocked by lots of people unrelated to Randi who were just trying to rid their timeline of nazis and etc. - and a bunch of those people were artists who now couldn't easily contact potential employers via twitter, which apparently (in the sense that I know nothing about this, not that I disbelieve this) put a serious crimp in their careers.

So a bunch of people experienced wildly disproportionate consequences for a single moment of anger online, as collateral damage from Wil trying to do something he considered good, and he's apologised for it but some people still believe he's transphobic because they don't feel the apology was commensurate to the degree of damage caused even if the damage was accidental.

I don't really have a take away here apart from "we have no idea how to do personal social media environment curation in a way that works yet". Mostly I just feel kinda sorry for everybody screwed over by the situation, including the subset I otherwise dislike.

So, in other words, he personally didn't do anything to "ruin the lives" of anyone.

He trusted someone that shouldn't have been trusted and in turn people trusted that his judgment was sound when it wasn't because Wil is more interested in playing the role correctly than to actually affect change or get in touch with those who can.

I'm sorry, there are a lot of people doing good work for social justice. Harper has never been one of them. There are those who use the platform of social justice to further their own brand and aren't actually concerned about getting people rights.

It's unfortunate that those people's careers were affected by getting on the wrong side of a vindictive bully, but I wouldn't call it Wil's fault. And I find it funny that Wil is getting the heat for it when it wasn't his list.

I think the argument is that he promoted somebody's personal blocklist as a general blocklist, and that this therefore made him culpable. Which I think was a judgement failure on his part, but not necessarily a trust related one, and I don't find the culpability part of the argument particularly convincing.

Note also that I said "the subset of people involved I dislike" to try and keep my opinions separate; I'm unsure why you're responding as if I'm supporting any specific person involved when I've merely done my best to outline the situation as I understand it.

I will admit to have had you confused with the person I originally asked, so there is some minor conflation there. That's my bad. I asked them a direct question and you responded instead.

They said it was his blocklist that he put these people on. And that simply by being on his blocklist, their lives were ruined.

That's not the same story you told me.

And ignores the part where Harper was promoting her blocklist as a superior version of ggautoblocker. She encouraged people to promote it. So to say it's his fault for promoting a "personal" list also feels hollow.

He trusted Randi. That was a mistake. People blindly trusted the list he promoted. That was also a mistake. There's a degree of personal responsibility that everybody who used that list without verifying the content shoulders.

The story I told is the story as I understand it, from reading a smattering of articles from various viewpoints. I suspect many people have largely heard the story from a giant game of telephone on twitter, and as such details and nuance have been lost and distorted.

Note that when I describe what I think the argument somebody's making is, that doesn't mean I endorse the argument, merely that I'm trying to explain what the argument is.

I'm not taking a position on "fault", all things considered.

The bit that's new to me is "popularized". How popular was this block list and how much of the popularity of it could be attributed to Wil?

Also, do people really contact potential employers through Twitter and don't have an alternative like email?

He was apparently patient zero for the list's spread through hollywood and other creative industry twitter.

Beyond that, no idea - I'm a bystander who happened to've read a few articles giving various points of view on this and have pieced together what I hope is an accurate 10,000ft view, but YMMV definitely applies.

AIUI it's even worse than that. According to a tweet thread I read, he actually ran his own personal blocklist that imported Randi Harper's blocklist, but also included pretty much anybody that annoyed him, for such tiny infractions as making a star trek reference at him on Twitter, or just being "rude". He personally blocked a bunch of trans artists whose Patreon and SoundCloud incomes subsequently dropped to zero.

The whole story sounds completely ridiculous.

Probably the best option for people who value their sanity is to just not associate with anyone involved in these nonsense Twitter dramas.

Maybe, but why should we believe this version of the story rather than the other one? Do you have a source?

You'd be better off believing neither, but taking the participants' stories as what they believe happened.

Then drawing your own conclusions.

(Sorry, not picking on you in particular; I'm just quite annoyed to see this thread treating the incident as a spam problem to be solved technically. There were also people who really did not like Wil Wheaton, and then suddenly found him in their online home.)

My source is a whole bunch of comments on Mastodon that I read as the whole thing was going down, plus a bunch of more comments on Twitter talking about what happened after it was all over. I don't have specific links as I didn't save any, but there were a lot of independent sources on this at the time.

Edit: found a new tweet that summarizes this: https://twitter.com/eiwbm_cat/status/1035716245914624003?s=2...

Wil does admit to some of it: "And for what it’s worth, the part of me that wants to apologize to the people who ended up [the blocklist] by mistake is overwhelmed by the part of me who was attacked really viciously by a lot of those people and feels like maybe blocking them wasn’t such a bad idea, after all."

That directly supports the narrative that he publicly blocklisted some innocent people, hasn't apologised and is being mobbed for it.

I love how he says "by mistake" as if he didn't personally add a bunch of people to his blocklist deliberately simply because he was mildly annoyed by them.

Hey Wil, when you personally are responsible for taking away the livelihood of a bunch of marginalized people, you don't get to complain about being "attacked really viciously" by your victims.

But none of the alleged others have written an explanation about their side of the story so there is nothing to compare.

They have written them, as toots on Mastodon and tweets on Twitter.

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